Riding with the camel herders of Pushkar.

The fair is the reason everyone comes and it is the least interesting part. For five days in November, Pushkar holds something that is now two events wearing one name: a livestock mela that has been happening for centuries, and a tourism festival with a hot air balloon and a moustache competition. They are held in adjacent fields. Most visitors see the second and photograph the first from its edge.

I went ten days early and stayed with a Raika family camped in the scrub four kilometres out, which is where the animals actually are before the ground fills up. The Raika are the traditional camel-herding community of Rajasthan, and Bhanwar Lal's family has been bringing animals to this fair for four generations. He had thirty-one that year: eleven he intended to sell, the rest breeding stock and two he was not going to sell to anybody and became slightly cold when asked about.

A camel that likes you will still not carry you anywhere you have not earned.

The days start before five, because the animals graze in the cool and because there is a considerable amount of walking involved in finding out where they have got to overnight. I was given, on the second morning, a young male called Moti and about four minutes of instruction. Riding a camel is not like riding a horse; the gait is a two-beat pace where both legs on one side move together, and the result at anything above a walk is a lateral roll that has to be absorbed rather than resisted. I was bad at it for two days and merely poor at it on the third.

Bhanwar Lal's assessment of my progress was blunt and, I came to think, not really about riding. “A camel that likes you will still not carry you anywhere you have not earned,” he said, which sounds like a proverb for a tea towel until you have spent an afternoon watching him get an animal to do something by asking it eleven times in slightly different ways rather than once with force.

The trade itself is in trouble and the family is entirely clear-eyed about it. Camel numbers in Rajasthan have fallen by something over seventy per cent in three decades. The 2015 law that made slaughter and export illegal was meant to protect the animal; the practical effect on a herder was to destroy the resale value of the males, which was a substantial part of what made keeping a herd viable. Grazing land has gone to irrigated agriculture. Two of Bhanwar Lal's four brothers now drive trucks.

What is left is milk, which is genuinely good and slightly salty and is now sold to a dairy at Jaipur; breeding sales to the few remaining herders; and tourists, who pay well and take up very little of the year. He is candid that the family's guests — six or eight groups a season, staying in tents alongside the camp — are now a meaningful share of the income, and equally candid that this is not a solution, because it is five weeks of demand and fifty-two weeks of animals.

The evening before the fair opened, the ground filled up. Two thousand animals, arriving through the afternoon from every direction, and by dusk there were cook fires the whole length of the sand. I sat with three generations of a family drinking tea, listening to a conversation about prices I could follow perhaps a third of, watching a boy of about nine handle a camel with more competence than I had managed in four days. Nobody was performing anything. The photographers were four hundred metres away, up on the road, waiting for the light.